Why Don’t People Know What They Are?

They think they know, when they actually do know.
That’s the paradox of life.

People prefer a story about themselves and others
to their reality.

We don’t know what we are because we confuse cultural conditioning, intellectual concepts and inherited beliefs with our true reality. Absurdly, we already possess the deepest reality of what we are – awareness itself – but we overlook it by searching for a thing or a definition.

Operating under the illusion of knowing about something is operating under the delusion of labels. We confuse labels – job titles, nationalities, hobbies, personality traits – with what we actually are.

Being unable to step back and examine our own mind objectively prevents us from seeing that our self-image is just a collection of thoughts rather than a permanent reality.

Because we already have a story about ourselves, we assume that we know what we are, and this blocks us from looking deeper. From childhood, we’ve inherited structures of language, belief, and expectation; the vast majority of what we consider our certainty isn’t actually discovered by us – it’s merely been adopted. People think they are the author of their thoughts, when they’re just the receiver of inherited social programming.

At the most fundamental level, people already do know what they are, but this doesn’t register.

What they think they know is actually mental constructs – memory-based selfies of the mind.
What they actually do know is the direct, immediate experience of being alive and aware now.

We don’t need to learn a formula to exist; we already know how to be conscious, but because our attention is constantly pulled towards internal and external labels, we miss the background of awareness itself.

We look for ourselves in what we think, rather than what we are.
This is why it is so easy to deceive people – we’re made to look, but not to see.